Chapter 8
CHLOE
The Halverson kitchen always went quiet in the same way at the end of the night.
Theo was asleep on his stomach with one foot out from under the duvet.
Owen was at the sink upstairs working at his teeth with the small electric brush his father had bought him, the buzz carrying down the back stairs the way every small sound in that house carried.
I wiped the counter once because it needed it and a second time because my hands needed the second pass.
I hung the cloth on the rail. I set the kettle off the burner.
I lined the boys' two cups up on the shelf the way Mrs. Halverson liked them.
My phone buzzed on the island.
Daniil.
I picked it up before the second buzz.
"I cannot get you tonight. Something has come up."
"Okay. Come by my place after, if you want."
A beat on his end. Wind. The far thunk of a car door.
"Are you alright?"
"I'm fine. Be careful."
The line clicked off the way his calls always did when he was already half inside the next room. I pressed the phone flat to my chest for one breath. The kitchen smelled like the lemon spray Mrs. Halverson kept under the sink.
I pulled my coat off the hook by the back stairs. I let myself out the side gate. The brownstone steps were dark from a rain that had come down an hour ago and gone. The block smelled like wet leaves and the bakery two doors down.
My phone buzzed against my hip before I had reached the corner.
A name on the screen I had not seen there in over a year.
Jacob.
Landed at JFK two nights back. He had a window before he flew out again for another month. He had picked a small place a block off Atlantic and he was buying and I was not allowed to say no.
A warmth moved through the bottom of my ribs.
He had been the cousin who held the back of the seat of a small purple bike on my grandmother's block in Queens when I was eight, who had run beside me for half a block after I had told him to let go because he wanted to be sure I did not fall.
He had been gone for a contract in Singapore for over a year.
I had missed him without letting myself notice I had missed him.
I typed back with my thumb on the rail of the stoop.
On my way. Order the banchan.
He sent a small flexing arm and a heart.
I walked.
Owen would be in bed by the time I sat down.
The walk over took twenty minutes through air that had not made up its mind whether to rain again.
The restaurant Jacob had picked was a small one with the front window steamed at the bottom.
Brown wood at the counter. Posters on the walls in two languages, an old one for a film I had watched at my mother's table at twelve, a newer one for a singer Owen would have named in one beat.
Garlic and bone broth at the door, the way that smell had hit me at my grandmother's table my whole life.
The owner was a man in his middle fifties at the host stand. Clean white apron. Gray at his temples cut close. His eyes went past me down the room and back to me and his mouth made a small kind shape.
"He's in the back booth."
"Thank you."
Jacob was already half on his feet by the time I was halfway down the aisle.
He had cut his hair. The long curl at his forehead I had teased him about at fourteen was gone.
He had a wool overcoat folded onto the booth beside him and a button-down open at the throat and the small chip on his front tooth he had carried since the morning he had tried to skate down three steps at thirteen.
He came around the table and he wrapped me up the way he had always wrapped me up, one arm at my back and one at the top of my head, and I let my face go into the place at his shoulder I had been putting it since I was small.
"You shrank."
"You got tall in Singapore."
"That's airline food. It pulls a man up at the spine."
He sat me on the inside of the booth. He slid in across from me.
The grill set into the table was warming.
The banchan was already out, six small white dishes, the kimchi he loved and the bean sprouts I loved and the small dried anchovies our grandmother had spooned onto our rice when we were too small to ask for them.
"How long?"
"A month. I fly back at the end of it."
"Catch me up."
He did. He told me about the apartment on the twenty-second floor with the view of a harbor that lit up at night the way a circuit board lit up.
He told me about the woman at the noodle stand at the bottom of his office who had learned his order in the second week.
He told me he had stood at passport control at one in the morning and watched a man in front of him fall asleep on his feet.
"You cut your hair."
"My mother cried."
"She would."
"You look good, Chloe. You look like you finally figured out which way is up."
"I'm getting there."
He picked up his chopsticks. He laid two strips of bulgogi onto the grill and the sizzle rose between us. He nudged the kimchi dish two inches closer to my hand because that was what he had always done.
"Are you seeing somebody?"
The strip of beef I was reaching for paused a half second over the grill.
"Yes."
"Look at that face."
"What face?"
"That one. The one that isn't telling me a thing."
"I'll tell you. Just not over the first round of meat."
"Fair."
I ate. He ate. The owner came by with a small dish of egg roll cut into rounds and set it down without a word and went back to the front.
Jacob talked about our grandmother's youngest sister, who had been calling him on a video app from her kitchen at five in the morning her time to show him the persimmons on her tree.
He talked about the friend from college who had bought a dog and named the dog after a poet.
He made me laugh twice before I had finished my rice.
He set his chopsticks down. He reached into the pocket of the coat folded next to him on the booth and brought up a small black velvet pouch and slid it across the table between the banchan.
"What is this?"
"Open it."
I pulled the drawstring. A small gold pendant slid out into my palm on a thin chain.
It was a simple shape, a small flat bar with a single character cut clean through the middle of it.
The character for water. Soft at the top and curved at the bottom.
He had remembered it had been my favorite since I had drawn it over and over on the back of my homework in the fourth grade.
"Jacob."
"I picked this up in a market in the second week. The woman who sold it to me said it was for someone who has finally gotten herself together."
I was up out of my side of the booth before I had decided to be up.
I came around the table. I put both arms around his shoulders and I held on.
He folded one hand up around the back of my head the way he had done at eight, the way he had done at twelve, the way he had done at the airport the morning he had flown out for the contract.
The bell at the door tapped.
I felt it before I saw it. The same shift in the air I had felt on a park bench the first time a man had come up behind me with no sound. I looked up over Jacob's shoulder.
Daniil.
His coat was open. His collar was wet from a rain that had started again outside. The bell was still moving against the glass. The look on his face was a look I had not been shown. It was not the face he wore for me. It was not the face he wore for a room. It was a third face.
He crossed the restaurant in three strides.
The fist landed before I had finished saying his name.
Jacob went back against the booth. A glass tipped on the table and rolled and went over the edge.
The room around us went quiet in a single beat the way a room does when a chair scrapes the wrong way.
Daniil's arm was cocking again. I was between them with one hand flat on his chest before his elbow had finished its rise.
"Stop! Daniil. Outside. Now."
The owner was already out from behind the counter, a phone in one hand. I did not look at him. I shook my head once. He stopped where he was. He did not love the choice. He let me have it.
Daniil's hand closed around my upper arm.
He was walking me toward the door before I had agreed to walk.
His grip was too tight. He did not know it was too tight.
We passed the host stand. We passed the door of a back kitchen with the steam coming through the slats.
He pushed the front door with his free hand and the bell tapped again and the wet of the sidewalk was at my feet and the awning was running at the edge.
I tried to twist my arm out of his hand. His fingers tightened on the bone of my arm before they eased, and the half second they eased he looked at my face.
"You're scaring me."
He stopped.
I watched it cost him. His chest dropped a half inch. His hand let go of my arm the way a man lets go of a thing he has just realized he is holding the wrong way. He stepped back a half step. He stood in the rain.
"You have never said that to me."
"I'm saying it now."
He looked at me. The rain ran past his temple down into the collar of his coat.
"Is that why you are dating another man? Because I am scary?"
"Are you serious right now?"
"I told you nobody touches what is mine. Chloe, I will not let this happen. I will put him in the ground if you choose him."
"Listen to yourself."
"I am listening."
"You are obsessed."
A beat. Two. The thing he had been holding back since the first night at the club came up the back of his throat, and it cost him to give it up.
"Yes. I am."
"I knew. I knew, and I made my peace with it." I let the air come back into me. "But this." I lifted one hand back toward the door of the restaurant behind me. "You hurt my cousin. My family. Without asking who he was. You decided. How did you know I was here?"